Karen Gahl-Mills

CEO, executive director, Cuyahoga Arts and
Culture

Karen Gahl-Mills set aside her own artistic career in music, as a cellist, to support the careers of other artists.

Well, maybe it would be more accurate to say her greatest talents lay outside performing. “I had a medium level of musical talent, but not really enough to make a living,” she said she realized while a music major at DePaul University in Chicago. “You go to music school, and you learn that pretty early.” Instead, she has played a major role in making Cleveland and Cuyahoga County the envy of arts communities across the country. Gahl-Mills, a graduate of Westlake High School and its marching band, leads Cuyahoga Arts and Culture (CAC), the Cuyahoga County agency that financially supports several hundred artists and programs a year, a level of public support exceeded by few communities. A 2014 study by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago that compared Chicago with a group of peer cities, put Cleveland at the top of the 13 metropolitan areas studied in the amount of public money per capita used to support the arts — $15.8 million of $18 million in public money spent in Cuyahoga came from CAC in 2012. At meetings of the United States Urban Arts Federation, a group of 60 arts executives, Gahl-Mills hears that “everybody’s looking for the kinds of resources we have.” CAC was created with the 2006 passage by voters of a small tax on cigarettes to support arts and cultural efforts. The tax was renewed in 2015, by a 75%-25% margin, in part because of Gahl-Mills’ efforts to make sure CAC-sponsored programs touched as many county residents as possible. Under Gahl-Mills, CAC has funded everything from the Cleveland Orchestra to the Foluké Cultural Arts Center on Cleveland’s East Side, which trains at-risk children and youth in dance, drama and voice and mounts performances by its students. Sari Feldman, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, was on the CAC board that hired Gahl-Mills and the two toured the county together on Gahl-Mills’ first interview visit. “I could see right away the perspective she had on how to make (CAC) have an impact on the community,” Feldman said. “She sees it as really being about both what it means to the individual as well as to the larger community. It’s great to talk about things like what it contributes to the local economy but it is also about what it contributes to the life of a child or a senior citizen or people who are geographically isolated from the great arts and cultural institutions in the city center.” After deciding a career as a musician or a music educator wasn’t for her, Gahl-Mills quit school and landed in Los Angeles, where she found work with a television advertising production company working with directors, cinematographers and then a company that did original music for television. She realized after a while that, though she believed she and the companies she worked for were doing quality work, the for-profit world wasn’t where she belonged. “I needed to feel that I, personally, was making a difference and it’s hard to feel sometimes that you’re making a difference when you’re making an ad that’s selling something, even if it’s a beautiful ad or it’s a wonderful piece of music behind the ad,” she said. “So chapter two was nonprofit management.” For that, she returned to Chicago. Belatedly, she finished her bachelor’s degree in music from DePaul in 1999 and then earned an MBA from the University of Chicago. As she was rounding out her MBA class schedule she thought, “I can’t take another accounting course,” so she strayed from the straight-and-narrow MBA curriculum to take a course called the Introduction to Cultural Policy. “It perked up my ears to what is cultural policy in this country and how do we think about it,” she recalled. During that time, she also worked at the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. After graduation, with the Ravinia Festival on her resume, she was hired to be executive director of the Westchester Philharmonic in suburban New York City and then it was on to the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. At that point, Gahl-Mills, and her Chicago-born husband Laurence Mills-Gahl, a software developer, had no plans to return to Cleveland. But then, in 2009, someone at a cocktail party mentioned a job opening at the Cuyahoga County public agency that had begun funding arts and cultural programs. So she took a look and found that, “something interesting was happening there; it married together all the things I had been thinking about.”